Muppets, or clever operators who have hacked the node software to somehow use a fraction of the RAM / CPU… I expect they wouldn’t do as well if they had to store a decent bunch of files.
I’m currently earning around 100 ANT per day from 1000 nodes (surely I’m not the only one seeing massive emissions earnings recently?)… so perhaps these big players are getting nothing? Someone must be, assuming there aren’t 5m ANT going out per day in emissions between 50m nodes 
or i could knock up a whale hunting geo map with there IP addresses and perhaps then we can get there peer id’s and @neo has previously been able to target uploads at specific nodes so we could target them with uploads ?
but i suspect there nodes can do quotes but can not store chunks is my theory.
And how long will we do this? Every time the price goes up, he will come back… We need a radical solution to the problem.
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no idea how long to put together my side to make a map a few hours but need to find that few hours and a value over which we think is suspicious to plot on it 
my solution would be that the team if its practical switch from basing emissions on quotes given and base it on ether chunks uploaded or served on request ?
would very quickly remove the incentive to have nodes that are only capable of giving out quotes but unable to get and put ?
It’s better to wait a few more months for him to swallow a few million tokens, we don’t want such quick actions, it’s not very carroty…
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I agree with @DavidMc0
I am all for whales doing there thing and all are welcome. but this appears like someone has figured out how to mess with the node software. as its not possible to run that many nodes on those systems.
But isn’t this all going to be sorted today, when the latest version is going to become the criteria for rewards?
I think the core problem is emissions are disconnected from data stored. Therefore, little data needs to be stored to qualify for the reward.
The economics were carefully balanced on upload cost feeding hosting rewards. That is now broken, as it is dwarfed by the size of emissions.
It feels like emissions should be much smaller or storage rewards need to be much larger. It has to relate to data stored and served.
I.e. encourage data storage and the hosting of said data, vs just being present with a node.
its is all good if uploads start flowing I don’t care what people are up to 
But at present it appears like there are completely unfeasible numbers of nodes running on machines at data center location machines which we can look up the specs of boxes available from the providers.
Yeah… We have this “proof of a quote” algorithm. A whole new approach in cryptoland
You can get lots more nodes out of 128gb than 3k. Easily double with current loads, I suspect. Using a chunk of virtual memory, maybe double again. That’s 12k nodes without really trying.
We must remember that the nodes have little to do, other than handle churn. Their memory usage is low and response times can be high.
Maybe they are being more creative, but I suspect it is standard node software, tbh.
that’s the issue imho
Cut emissions to 1% of their present value. Sort out the shortfall in years 2 to 5.
Because if we don’t there won’t be a year 2 let alone 5.
Only pay out on emissions when a viable balance is due eg $1 min payout.
Paying 15 cents in gas fees to deliver 2/3 of a cent of emission “earnings” is just mental.
Time to admit the original emissions plan has been thoroughly gamed.
EDIT I see over on Discord that I have been corrected on this by @riddim
MetaMask would seem to be rather misleading - the 15 cents was the gas fee to send to >100 addresses , not just my miniscule “earnings”.
Whatever - its time to move the economic carrot to actual storage of chunks,not a reward for claiming you canstore chunks, whether true or not.
In theory.
I ran up a hetzners with dual SSD hard drives in rade 0 to see what what was possible and the hard drives started overloading at 1.8k nodes with access times spiking to 22 minutes. So I see no way that a machine can run 12k nodes without ram drives or something fancy or maybe nmve hard drives.
As soon as emissions become a small component, it forces storage rewards to become a large component. As soon as they are flipped, the economics are supporting the network vs working against it.
Ofc, it requires uploads to feed the network, but we know that is needed long term anyway.
Not sure if 1% is the right emissions, but certainly it shouldn’t be overwhelming upload rewards so grossly.
And 23k nodes all writing logs that would cripple a machines io times
Yeah “1%” is my opening offer
In any case I think we should be only paying out when there is a significant sum (>$10?) to transact. Saves gas fees and hits cashflow for the whales. Home users can look at their “balance due” and be credited when they exceed the target or at the end of each month.
So
SERIOUS cut to emissions
Only pay out once a month or more.
That’s genius just do like beta credit people’s account pay out when ever thats perfect
I have put that down as a Q on the form for Stages tomorrow night.
Interesting.
Some of my 2017 mini PCs have dynamically adjusted up over 450 nodes in 8gb ram. This is with standard 5k 2.5" laptop drives for data and an m.2. SSD for apps/logs/swap.
Less that 0.5 load per core, only 2gb of swap is used.
So, I’m surprised you hit the buffers on the above. I’m sure my boxes would feel the pain as.load ramped up, but that is why I have them adjust themselves (I can’t predict the load).
The boxes only have about 2.25TB, so would struggle to fully host more than around 60 or 70 half full nodes. With a bit of CPU load, it would also be a lot fewer than 450. I may also find my bandwidth gets gobbled with so many active.
The problem is, nodes are so easy to run right now, because they do so little. It was always going to be a game of optimising systems for nodes. If you don’t play the game, you get a dwindling share of the rewards, so game theory dictates this result.
Emissions are just too overwhelming vs data upload fees and/or effort to store limited data. It needs rebalancing.
